What makes a pokemon special
Introduction
The world of pokemon! The world that is filled with these
creatures known as pokemon, from small and cute to huge and deadly,
there is no end to variety when it comes to these creatures in this
world. However, even in this world, the legendary and mythical pokemon
hold a special status. Worshiped as gods, feared as destructive forces,
revered as deities and guardians, these mighty creatures posses an
enormous amount of strength and unique abilities. However, these pokemon
are special not only in their abilities but also in numbers, for how few
of them there are! So few that it is a grey area for even Professor
Samuel Oak, the leading figure when it comes to pokemon research.
Remember the goosebumps when you caught your first such pokemon or the
feeling of how special an anime episode felt when one of these made an
appearance? Yeah that rare! So what’s so special about them? What makes
these creatures so special? Let’s dive right in and find out!.
Count
Okay, so let’s get started and first we will take a look at the
number of pokemon for each category.
## # A tibble: 70 × 15
## index name generation type1 type2 total hp atk def spatk spdef speed
## <dbl> <chr> <fct> <chr> <chr> <dbl> <dbl> <dbl> <dbl> <dbl> <dbl> <dbl>
## 1 144 Artic… Generatio… Ice Flyi… 580 90 85 100 95 125 85
## 2 145 Zapdos Generatio… Elec… Flyi… 580 90 90 85 125 90 100
## 3 146 Moltr… Generatio… Fire Flyi… 580 90 100 90 125 85 90
## 4 150 Mewtwo Generatio… Psyc… None 680 106 110 90 154 90 130
## 5 243 Raikou Generatio… Elec… None 580 90 85 75 115 100 115
## 6 244 Entei Generatio… Fire None 580 115 115 85 90 75 100
## 7 245 Suicu… Generatio… Water None 580 100 75 115 90 115 85
## 8 249 Lugia Generatio… Psyc… Flyi… 680 106 90 130 90 154 110
## 9 250 Ho-Oh Generatio… Fire Flyi… 680 106 130 90 110 154 90
## 10 377 Regir… Generatio… Rock None 580 80 100 200 50 100 50
## # ℹ 60 more rows
## # ℹ 3 more variables: height <dbl>, weight <dbl>, rank <chr>## # A tibble: 23 × 15
## index name generation type1 type2 total hp atk def spatk spdef speed
## <dbl> <chr> <fct> <chr> <chr> <dbl> <dbl> <dbl> <dbl> <dbl> <dbl> <dbl>
## 1 151 Mew Generatio… Psyc… None 600 100 100 100 100 100 100
## 2 251 Celebi Generatio… Psyc… Grass 600 100 100 100 100 100 100
## 3 385 Jirac… Generatio… Steel Psyc… 600 100 100 100 100 100 100
## 4 386 Deoxys Generatio… Psyc… None 600 50 150 50 150 50 150
## 5 489 Phione Generatio… Water None 480 80 80 80 80 80 80
## 6 490 Manap… Generatio… Water None 600 100 100 100 100 100 100
## 7 491 Darkr… Generatio… Dark None 600 70 90 90 135 90 125
## 8 492 Shaym… Generatio… Grass None 600 100 100 100 100 100 100
## 9 493 Arceus Generatio… Norm… None 720 120 120 120 120 120 120
## 10 494 Victi… Generatio… Psyc… Fire 600 100 100 100 100 100 100
## # ℹ 13 more rows
## # ℹ 3 more variables: height <dbl>, weight <dbl>, rank <chr>
As we can look there are 70 legendary pokemon to date but only
29 mythical ones. But it’s okay considering the fact that mythical
pokemon are supposedly rarer of the two and were introduced later.
Battle Statistics
As we all know from our experiences in Pokemon, be it the games
or the anime, these Pokemons were extraordinarily strong and most
difficult to beat. They were treated as gods, deities and guardians
after all.
And true to their name, the legendary pokemons live up to the
hype with most of them ranging around 600 and a fair few also nearing or
crossing the 700 mark. One curious point is the five pokemon in below
which have lower stats but all of them are from the newer generations
where the new concept of evolving legendary pokemons was introduced and
a few of them like Cosmog and Kubfu are those early stages of a
legendary pokemon.
The distribution is much uniform when it comes to the mythical
’mons with most being in the 600 range, or exact 600 to be accurate. The
effect of evolving mythical pokemons can be seen here as well, in the
form of Meltan and Phione. The highest one above all else is of course
Arcues. Well, not for nothing is he the god of the pokemon world.
Height and Weight
As shown in the below plot, it’s clear that most of the
legendary pokemon are tall heavyweights with there being two outliers.
One is Cosmoem which is tiny in size but weights like the universe
itself! The other one is Gen 8’s Eternatus, which is an outlier to the
very idea of a pokemon in itself, and has extremely high height and
weight.
On the other hand, the mythical pokemon are much lighter and
less taller as well (not to mention much cuter). The one exception to
their weight is Gen 7’s Steel Freak Melmetal, which weighs close to 8000
kilograms!
Generation
Looking at the number of legendary pokemon released in each
generation over the years it’s obvious that the number of legendary
pokemon has been increasing with each generation, which is quite
predictable. Gen-6 might seem like the outlier but that was the year
when least pokemon were released so it’s lack of legendary pokemon is
understandable.
However, there is no such pattern when it comes to mythical ’mon
with the franchise releasing only one mythical pokemon each over the
last two gens (Seriously?)! The lack of mythical pokemon in the earlier
gens or even overall as they were introduced as “rare” pokemon but maybe
releasing only one each generation takes them more towards extinct and
less towards rare (note that Game Freak!).
Types
Below we can see that the psychic type a counts for the most
number of pokemon in both the legendary and mythical categories. A high
number of legendary pokemon are dragon type which makes sense as they
are always so strong. One key point to notice is that though the flying
type accounts for many legendary pokemon, almost all of them have had it
as a secondary typing(all except Tornadus), which happens when there is
no secondary typing available for the pokemon and the creators want it
to have one. I mean, many of the pokemon can fly but don’t have a flying
type (see Giratina, Dialga, Palkia), so it doesn’t makes much sense. And
no such love for flying type is shown for the mythical pokemon, which
don’t have a single flying type ’mon in their ranks. But again, when it
comes to the flying type, not much makes sense.
Predicting the status
Finally, I have built a classification model which classifies
the pokemon as legendary, mythical and ordinary (in case they are
classified as neither legendary not mythical). The model uses a random
forest algorithm to make its predictions. It takes the battle statistics
of the pokemon and their dimensions as feature inputs and performs the
multi-class classification.
The random forest algorithm takes optimal values for number of
estimators and criterion as 63 and gini, which values were determined
using grid search algorithm.
## Best Values for Parameters: {'criterion': 'gini', 'n_estimators': 63}
It has a accuracy score of 95.68% and standard variation of
1.37% validated 10 times using k-fold cross validation.
## Average Accuracy: 96.34%## Standard Deviation of Accuracy: 1.34%
The model narrowly outperforms the XGBoost classification model
built for the same task.
Variable Importance
At last, we’ll look at the features that contributed the most to
our random forest model as it is also interesting to know which variable
is contributing how much to the model. For this purpose, we’ll use the
two measures of variable importance returned by a random forest
algorithm: MeanDecreaseAccuracy and MiniDecreaseGini.
## Feature MeanDecreaseAccuracy MeanDecreaseGini
## 0 total 0.112195 0.357514
## 1 hp 0.005854 0.073343
## 2 atk 0.003415 0.060455
## 3 def 0.003415 0.052870
## 4 spatk 0.002439 0.097388
## 5 spdef 0.000976 0.066754
## 6 speed 0.001951 0.094824
## 7 height 0.004390 0.082695
## 8 weight -0.000488 0.114158
Conclusion
It was a lot of fun doing this project and getting to know more
and more about the pokemon that we all love so much. Thanks for reading
this and hope that this was a joyful and nostalgic ride for you as well.
Sadly, that’s all there is about the legendary and mythical pokemon and
I’ll have to sign off now. Hope we meet again on another such topic
sometime soon. Until then, Gotta Catch ’Em All!